My little sister called me a cheap, cold bitch in front of our father because I wouldn’t let her pay $740 to get Mom’s locket back from a pawn shop.
“You’d rather a thief keep it than see me wear it,” she said.
She hadn’t seen what I found folded up inside it, or who had carried it in there.
Mom wore that locket every day of my thirty-eight years, and nobody was allowed to open it.
“It sticks,” she’d say, and tuck it back under her collar.
Monique dented the back of it on the patio steps when she was six.
Mom never got it fixed.
In January, when Mom was in the hospital bed in Dad’s den, a woman we didn’t know came to sit with her.
Twice.
Mom said she was a friend from the bakery, from before Dad.
Gray coat. Short hair. She held Mom’s hand and they barely talked.
Mom died on February 9th.
The locket was gone from the dish on her nightstand.
Monique decided that same afternoon who took it.
“That bakery woman robbed a dying lady,” she said. “I want her name.”
Nobody had her name. Mom never gave it.
Dad said to let it go, so we did, mostly.
Then last Tuesday I was walking my fourteen four-year-olds to the park on the walking rope.
Hudson stopped dead in front of the pawn shop on Ninth Street in Muncie and pressed his whole face on the window.
He wanted the toy drum.
I went to peel him off the glass. Then I saw the dent.
Gold oval. Thin chain. The little dent turned out toward the street.
My hands started shaking on the rope.
I took a picture and texted it to Monique before I even had the kids moving again.
“FOUND IT. Ninth Street. $740.”
That text is on me. I know.
At 5:40, after the last parent pickup, I went back by myself.
The owner, a man named Deepak, took it out of the case and let me hold it.
“Lady pawned it in February,” he said.
“Paid the interest every month like clockwork. Missed October. Called me Monday crying and asked for until Friday.”
“So why’s it in the window?”
“Thirty days late goes in the window,” he said. “I’ve got rent too.”
I worked my thumbnail into the seam.
It stuck, the way Mom always said.
Then it gave.
On one side was a picture of a newborn I’d never seen.
Bald, red, squinting. Not me. Not Monique.
We were both born with a full head of black hair.
On the other side, folded into a square smaller than a postage stamp, was a hospital bracelet.
The old plastic kind, with a slip of paper inside.
I smoothed it out on the glass.
The ink had gone brown, but I could read it.
GIRL WHITLEY. 6 lb 1 oz. 4-11-77.
Whitley was Mom’s name before she married Dad.
I was born in 1988. I’m the oldest.
I’ve been the oldest my whole life.
I folded it back along the same creases and closed the locket.
“Can she still get it?” I said.
Deepak shrugged. “If somebody pays the hold. Sixty bucks buys her thirty days.”
I paid him sixty in cash.
He took it off the velvet and put it in the back.
That night at Dad’s, Monique had already been to the bank.
She fanned the twenties out across the placemats like a hand of cards.
“Saturday morning,” she said. “He opens at ten.”
“Don’t,” I said.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t buy it. Leave it there.”
Dad put his fork down.
Monique laughed. “Are you serious? She took it off Mom’s nightstand while Mom was dying.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Then who did? Say it, Fiona.”
I looked at Dad. Forty years married to her.
He’d only just learned how to work his own coffee maker.
I couldn’t do it to him at the dinner table.
So I said nothing.
That’s when she called me cheap and cold, and the rest.
“You couldn’t even split the headstone with me,” she said.
“And now you want to cost me the only thing she ever loved.”
She swept the twenties back into the envelope and left her plate full.
Saturday I got to the shop at 9:50.
She was already at the door.
Deepak unlocked it, and Monique walked straight to the counter with her envelope out.
“The gold locket from the window. I’ll take it.”
“It’s not for sale,” he said. “Somebody paid the hold.”
Monique turned around slowly and looked at me.
Two other customers were in there. A guy with a guitar case.
An older lady holding a ring box. Both of them stopped.
“You PAID him?” Monique said. “You PAID him to keep it from ME?”
“It isn’t ours, Mo.”
“IT’S MOM’S.”
She told Deepak she wanted to see it, and something in her voice made him go get it.
She went at the seam with one long acrylic nail. It stuck.
She dug harder and it popped open on the glass.
The bracelet fell out.
Monique unfolded it before I could reach her.
She read it twice. Her lips moved on the date.
“Who’s GIRL WHITLEY?” she said.
Behind us the bell over the door rang.
It was the woman in the gray coat.
She had an envelope too, a thin one, and she was out of breath.
She looked at the locket lying open on the counter, then at my sister’s hand on it, then at me.
“I came for my mother’s locket,” she said.
The gray coat
“Your mother’s name?” Monique said.
“Estelle. My name’s Renee.”
I moved the bracelet away from Monique’s sleeve before the edge of it snagged.
My sister put her palm over the locket.
Renee held out her envelope to Deepak.
“My ticket’s in there. And the money. You said Saturday was all right.”
“It is,” he said.
“So you’re GIRL WHITLEY?” Monique said.
Renee looked at the strip of plastic beside my hand.
“That’s me.”
There it was. A woman with a name, standing close enough that I could touch her coat.
My mother had held her hand in our den.
I’d offered her tea in a mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST MOM.
I wanted that mug removed from history.
“She gave it to me,” Renee said.
Monique gave a laugh with no amusement in it.
“Of course she did.”
“Please take your hand off it.”
“Please tell me why our mother’s necklace was in a pawn shop.”
Deepak reached across the counter.
“I’ll hold this while we talk.”
Monique kept her hand down for another second.
Then she lifted it, as though letting a waiter clear a plate she hadn’t finished.
He put the locket behind the counter. I slid the bracelet toward him.
Renee followed it with her eyes.
“Don’t lose that,” she said.
“I won’t.”
I wanted to say something kind.
I had a whole job built around finding something kind to say when somebody’s day had gone wrong.
Apparently those skills stopped at four feet tall.
“I paid the hold,” I said.
Renee looked at me properly.
“That was you?”
“Yes.”
She pressed the envelope against her coat.
“I thought he’d just given me more time.”
“He called you?”
“Yesterday. I got the rest together last night.”
Monique pushed her own envelope across the glass.
“And I’ve got seven hundred forty dollars right here. Actual money. For the actual necklace.”
Deepak pushed it back.
“The hold stands.”
“You can give my sister her sixty dollars back.”
“No,” I said.
She turned to me.
“You’ve known about this since Tuesday?”
“I knew what was in it.”
“And you let me sit at Dad’s table.”
I could have told her that she’d done most of the sitting and all of the shouting.
I could have reminded her that I’d tried to speak.
But she was right about one thing.
I’d let a strip of plastic become a secret in my own pocket, even without taking it home.
Renee moved closer to the counter.
“Does Wally know I’m here?”
Monique took out her phone.
“He will in about ten seconds.”
Mom’s clasp
In January, I’d stood behind Mom’s bed with the chain stretched between my fingers because her clasp had worked around to the front again.
She hated that.
The bed could take up Dad’s den.
The bathroom could be full of things none of us wanted to need.
But the clasp belonged at the back of her neck, and God help anybody who suggested it didn’t matter.
“Hold still,” I said.
“I’m in a hospital bed, Fiona. Where am I going?”
Monique sat beside her, turning the locket over.
“Look at that dent. You should’ve had it fixed.”
“You should’ve stayed off the patio steps.”
“I was six.”
“And yet here we are.”
Mom could still get us both with half a sentence.
Monique lifted the loose chain against her own neck while I tried to catch the clasp.
“This is exactly the length I like.”
Mom held the locket between two fingers.
“Then buy a chain that length.”
“I only meant someday.”
“I know what you meant.”
Monique put it down. Her face folded, and Mom reached for her wrist.
“Come here, Mo.”
My sister leaned into the bed. Mom kissed her forehead.
There were plenty of times Mom hurt her feelings and then kissed the place she’d hurt.
Monique usually accepted that as a complete repair.
I tended to keep the receipt.
That afternoon, Mom wanted pictures from the tin under her bed.
She’d always written on the backs. Names, dates, little comments nobody had requested.
My school photograph said, “Fiona, before she cut her own fringe.”
As though somebody examining it in a hundred years might otherwise blame a professional.
Monique’s first photograph had a question mark after her weight.
Mom insisted the nurse’s scale was wrong.
I held pictures up while she chose.
“That one. No, the one behind it.”
“This?”
“Yes. Give me the pen.”
She kept the pictures on the tray across her lap.
Her hand shook enough that I offered to write for her.
“I can write my own daughters’ names.”
“All right.”
“Don’t use that nursery voice on me.”
There was no winning with a woman who knew what your work voice sounded like and disliked being on the receiving end.
I left her with the pen while I went to rinse a cup.
The woman in the gray coat came that afternoon. Renee.
I could put her name there now.
Mom sent me to the kitchen for tea, then told me to take my own cup upstairs and put my feet up.
I’d been sleeping on the sofa three nights out of five.
My leave from the nursery had run through the paid part and into the part where you stop opening your banking app in company.
“You’re allowed to sit down somewhere I’m not,” Mom said.
I nearly cried because she’d given me permission.
That’s an embarrassing thing to admit about being thirty-eight.
When I came back, the visitor was leaving.
Mom’s locket sat in the dish.
I remembered that because I offered to put it on her, and she covered it with her hand.
“Later.”
I didn’t see it again before the pawn shop window.
After she died, Monique chose the headstone. She wanted the better lettering.
I said I couldn’t pay half then, and she said she’d handle it.
I’d thanked her.
I hadn’t understood that “handle it” came with a lifetime speaking slot.
Now her phone was against her ear, and Renee stood beside me with her envelope.
“Dad,” Monique said. “You need to come down here.”
My text
“Don’t tell him like this,” I said.
Monique turned her shoulder.
“No, I’m at the shop. Fiona’s here too.”
I reached toward the phone, then stopped.
Taking it would have given her a performance she could describe for the next twenty years.
“Put him on speaker.”
She looked pleased with that request.
“Dad, I’m putting you on speaker.”
His voice came out small.
“Did you get it?”
“No. Fiona paid the man not to sell it to me.”
“I paid for more time,” I said.
“For the woman who took it,” Monique said.
Renee’s mouth opened.
I held up my hand to Monique.
“There’s somebody here you need to meet, Dad. But I should’ve spoken to you first.”
“Who?”
“The woman who visited Mom.”
Nothing came through the phone for a moment.
Then Dad said, “What’s she doing there?”
“She says Mom gave her the locket.”
Monique leaned toward the phone.
“She says Mom was her mother.”
The older woman with the ring box looked down.
Deepak put both hands on the counter.
Renee closed her envelope, though nothing had come out of it.
“Fiona?” Dad said.
“There’s a hospital bracelet inside it. From before you and Mom met.”
“Bring the necklace here.”
“We can’t just take it.”
“I’ll come down.”
The call ended.
Monique laid the phone beside her money.
“That should’ve happened Tuesday.”
“Yes,” I said.
She blinked. She’d come prepared for an argument and I’d taken away the first step.
I turned to Renee.
“I’m sorry he got it that way.”
“So am I.”
Monique pulled up my photograph of the window and held it between us.
“Look. FOUND IT. She was thrilled when she thought we could get it back. Now she’s acting like I’m robbing somebody.”
Renee read the message.
I wanted to hide the capital letters. They looked so pleased with themselves.
“I thought somebody had stolen it,” I said.
“You both did.”
“Yes.”
Monique tapped the screen.
“And nothing’s changed except she came in here with a story.”
Deepak picked up Renee’s envelope.
“She has the pawn ticket. She’s the customer who brought it in.”
“That tells you she had it,” Monique said.
“It doesn’t tell you how she got it.”
She was right about that, too.
I hated how often a person could be right about a small thing while making a room unbearable.
I turned to him.
“What if I buy it, and we sort this out somewhere else?”
Monique lifted her envelope at once.
“That’s what I’ve been saying.”
“Not you. Me.”
With what, I hadn’t worked out.
My card had enough room if I didn’t need anything inconvenient afterward, such as groceries.
Deepak shook his head.
“You paid to stop a sale. Now you want a sale?”
“I want to get everyone out of here.”
Renee pulled her envelope back.
“I don’t want you to buy it.”
“I could keep it until we know what to do.”
“No.”
Her answer came so quickly that I stopped.
She looked at my sister, then at me.
“I’ve had to ask him for time. I’ve had to come back here every month. I’m not asking you two whether I’m allowed to have it.”
The man with the guitar case shifted toward the other end of the counter.
I wished I could go with him and be interested in whatever was wrong with his guitar.
Monique folded her arms.
“Then tell us why you sold it.”
“I didn’t sell it.”
“You put it in a window with a price.”
Renee looked straight at me.
“You’re still trying to buy it away from me.”
The thin envelope
I took my card out of my hand and put it back in my purse.
“You’re right.”
Monique made a noise through her nose.
“Don’t start apologizing for everybody. I haven’t apologized.”
“I wasn’t doing it for you.”
Renee set her envelope on the counter again, but kept two fingers on it.
Deepak asked whether she’d like to wait near the back while he helped the other customers.
“No,” she said. “I’d rather stay where I can see it.”
He nodded and took the older woman’s ring box.
Monique leaned beside me.
“Ask her.”
“You’ve been asking her.”
“Ask her how she found Mom. Ask her why we never heard her name. You’re the one who knows everything.”
I knew almost nothing.
I knew the date on a bracelet and that my mother could keep a secret while reminding Dad about a coupon he’d misplaced in 1994.
“She doesn’t owe us her whole life at a counter,” I said.
“She wants our mother’s necklace.”
“I want mine,” Renee said.
Monique faced her.
“Then why pawn it?”
“My hours were cut.”
“What hours?”
“At work.”
“And you didn’t have anything else?”
Renee’s fingers moved on the envelope.
“I had this.”
I wanted to tell Monique about the week I’d checked the balance on a grocery gift card before buying laundry soap.
She’d been there when Mom needed a new nightgown, though.
She’d seen me put my own things back.
There wasn’t a shortage of evidence in my sister’s life.
Just a shortage of occasions when she thought it applied to her.
“You could’ve come to us,” Monique said.
Renee looked at her for a long time.
“You didn’t know my name.”
“You could’ve said you were Mom’s friend.”
“And asked you for money?”
“Instead you took the one thing we couldn’t replace.”
Renee pulled her envelope toward her chest.
“She put it in my hand.”
“When?”
“The second time I came.”
I could see that afternoon: the cup in the sink, Mom’s hand over the dish, my shoes kicked off upstairs.
“After I went upstairs?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Was anybody else there?”
“No.”
Monique spread her hands.
“There.”
I hated that little word.
She’d put an entire woman on trial and announced the verdict with one syllable.
Renee looked toward the door.
“I can come back another day.”
The hold gave her that. Thirty days.
I’d paid for breathing room, and here we were using every inch of it to crowd her.
“You can,” I said.
Monique picked up her phone.
“And I’ll bring Dad back another day. We aren’t dropping this.”
Renee stayed where she was.
I said, “Mo.”
“What? You want me to pretend? Fine. Hello. Lovely to meet you. Please keep the necklace you took from our dying mother.”
Deepak closed the ring box and handed it back to the older woman.
“That’s enough.”
“This is a family matter.”
“Then lower your voice.”
Monique looked around as though the shop had filled itself with spectators expressly to inconvenience her.
Renee put her envelope down.
“How much is it today?”
Deepak checked the paper inside.
“Two hundred fourteen dollars and sixty cents.”
She opened the flap. There were bills and coins in there.
Monique’s envelope was fat enough to stand up.
Renee’s wouldn’t stay open without her thumb.
I knew what it cost to put coins into an envelope.
You’d run out of pretending the jar on top of the fridge didn’t count.
Renee began laying the money on the glass.
The bell rang before she reached the coins.
Dad came through the door without looking at me.
Dad’s hand
Monique went straight to him.
She put a hand on his arm and guided him toward the counter. He let her.
I’d spent months teaching him how to make a meal that didn’t arrive in a cardboard tray.
Now he walked past me as though I was somebody waiting for a bus.
“Show me,” he said.
Deepak brought the locket forward.
Renee stepped away so Dad could stand in front of it.
He touched the dent with his thumb.
“That’s hers.”
“I know,” Monique said.
Then he picked up the bracelet.
He read it without speaking.
He turned it over, though there was nothing on the other side.
“Estelle Whitley,” he said.
Renee nodded.
Dad looked at her.
“How old are you?”
“Forty-nine.”
He did the counting. I could practically hear the numbers scrape.
“My wife’s been dead since February.”
“I know.”
“And nobody thought I should know about this?”
I took a step toward him.
“I should’ve told you Tuesday.”
“You should have.”
No raised voice. I’d have preferred one.
Dad could shout about a football game and be over it before the replay.
This came out flat.
Renee said, “I asked her to tell you.”
Monique turned.
“When?”
“In January.”
“And she didn’t.”
“No.”
“Then maybe she had a reason.”
Dad put the bracelet down too hard.
I reached for it before remembering it wasn’t mine to tidy away.
“Don’t,” he said.
My hand stopped.
He wasn’t looking at the bracelet. He was looking at me.
“Just leave things where they are for a minute, Fiona.”
I stood with my hand beside my leg.
All those weeks in the den, I’d known what to do with my hands.
Water cup. Blanket. Pill packet. The clasp at the back of Mom’s neck.
Now they hung there like a pair I’d borrowed.
Monique touched his sleeve.
“I wanted to bring it home. That’s all. You gave me the money to get it home.”
Dad nodded.
Until then, I’d thought those twenties were hers.
“You gave her the money?”
“She said you’d found it.”
Monique put her palm on the envelope.
“I went to the bank because you said it was there.”
Dad looked at Deepak.
“I gave my daughter seven hundred forty dollars. Your price. Why can’t she pay it?”
“Because the woman who pawned it can still redeem it.”
“Because Fiona paid you.”
“The hold’s been paid,” Deepak said.
Dad rubbed his face.
He’d left the house without shaving.
There was a line on one cheek from his pillow, and I hated Mom for about three seconds.
Then I wanted her so badly I had to press my tongue against my teeth.
“Can we take it home and talk?” he said.
Renee shook her head.
“It’s mine.”
“We don’t know that.”
“She gave it to me.”
“And she told me you worked at a bakery.”
Renee looked down.
Dad turned to me.
“Get your sixty dollars back. Let your sister buy it. We can settle the rest at home.”
I could’ve said yes.
I could’ve stood beside him instead of across from him.
I could’ve let Monique tuck the locket into her envelope, and nobody in that shop would have called me disloyal again that morning.
“Dad, I can’t.”
He stared at me.
“You can. You’re choosing not to.”
Monique’s hand tightened around his arm.
He let her keep it there.
Then Dad reached for the necklace, and Renee put her hand between his and the counter.
I had never seen my father draw back from somebody’s hand before.
He moved beside Monique.
The open locket
Deepak took the locket back.
“No one’s taking anything while we’re doing this.”
Monique spread Dad’s money across the counter again.
Thirty-seven twenties. She lined the edges up with the sort of care she’d never given a fitted sheet in her life.
“There,” she said. “It’s all here.”
Deepak didn’t touch it.
Dad looked at Renee.
“Did she tell you who I was?”
“Yes.”
“Did she tell you about the girls?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see photographs?”
Renee nodded.
“She showed me some on the second visit.”
His face changed at that.
I’d been upstairs. He’d been getting groceries.
Mom had held a family gathering in the den without inviting the family who lived there.
“She showed you us,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And we got told you were from the bakery.”
“I didn’t choose that.”
“You went along with it.”
Renee’s eyes filled.
“She was dying.”
“So I keep hearing,” Monique said. “That seems to make everything all right.”
“Mo, stop.”
“No, Fiona. You stop. You’ve decided she’s telling the truth because you like being the good one.”
I nearly answered with something that would have stayed between us forever.
Instead I said, “I haven’t decided everything.”
“You told me it wasn’t ours.”
“I know what I said.”
“And now Dad’s standing here, and you still can’t explain it.”
She had me. I’d taken a belief and spoken it as a fact because the date on that bracelet frightened me more than the price in the window.
Renee rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand.
“I’ll go.”
Monique gathered the chain’s empty place on the glass with her eyes.
“Leave the ticket.”
Renee looked up.
“If you want us to believe you care about Mom, leave the ticket. Let Dad have the necklace. You can keep the bracelet and the picture.”
Deepak said, “That’s not something you get to decide.”
“I’m trying to find an answer.”
Monique turned to Renee.
“You get your little keepsakes. We get our mother’s necklace. Fiona gets her money back. Nobody loses.”
Renee reached toward her envelope.
I caught myself leaning forward. Part of me wanted her to agree.
That was the ugliest part of that morning.
I wanted the room to stop hurting, and she was the one person I could imagine paying the price without making more noise.
She slid the loose coins into the envelope.
Monique began stacking the twenties.
“There. We can all calm down.”
Renee’s hands shook so much that one coin rolled against the edge of the glass.
I caught it and held it out.
She took it without looking at me.
“I didn’t come here for a family,” she said.
Dad’s mouth moved, but nothing came out.
“I came for the thing she gave me.”
“You can have what’s inside,” Monique said.
Renee turned toward the door.
I thought about going home with Dad.
About putting his kettle on and letting him tell me how badly I’d handled it.
I could almost see the three of us finding our old places around the kitchen table, with one extra person removed from the room.
I stepped in front of Renee.
“Please stay.”
She wiped her cheek.
“For what?”
I didn’t have an answer I trusted.
Behind me, Monique said, “Fiona, let her leave.”
That was the moment I lost the easy way back to Dad.
I couldn’t pretend later that I’d only been confused, or that Deepak had forced us to wait.
I put my purse on the counter.
“I’m staying with her.”
Dad stepped away from me.
Monique reached for the pawn ticket.
Renee held it against her chest.
The photograph
“May I look at the picture?” I said.
Renee looked tired enough to sit down on the floor.
“Why?”
“Mom wrote on pictures.”
Monique pushed air through her nose.
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
I kept looking at Renee.
“I don’t know whether she wrote on this one.”
Deepak opened the locket and set it down between us.
The photograph had slipped sideways when Monique forced it open.
One edge sat above the little rim.
Renee nodded.
“Be careful.”
I worked my thumbnail underneath.
It was the same thumbnail I’d used on Tuesday.
I wanted to go back and make that woman do a better job.
Open it properly. Turn it over. Pick up the phone.
The picture came free.
On the back, in Mom’s writing, were six words.
“For Renee. My first girl. Mom.”
Below them she’d written January.
The ink slanted downhill.
Nobody spoke while I held it.
Then Monique said, “That could just mean the picture.”
Renee covered her mouth.
Dad put his hand out.
I gave it to him.
He brought it close to his face. His reading glasses were at home.
Monique began to get her phone, but he shook his head.
“I can read it.”
He ran his thumb beneath the writing without touching it.
“She put a dot under her name,” he said.
Mom always had. A full stop wasn’t enough for her.
Her name needed a little tap on the shoulder.
Renee gave a laugh through her tears.
“She couldn’t get the picture back in.”
I looked at her.
“Her fingers wouldn’t do it. I did it for her.”
“The second visit?”
“Yes.”
Mom had sent me upstairs. She’d kept the pen.
The locket had been in the dish when I left the room.
Renee reached toward the picture, then stopped short of Dad’s hand.
“She said she was giving it to me early. For my birthday.”
Dad closed his eyes.
“I said I couldn’t take something she wore every day,” Renee said.
“She said she’d carried me around long enough. It was my turn.”
Monique’s fingers left the money.
Renee was crying openly now, with none of the tidy little pauses people manage when they still think they can get away with it.
“I asked about you. All of you. She said she’d explain.”
Dad opened his eyes.
“She didn’t.”
“I know that now.”
I put my hand on the counter beside Renee’s.
She took it so hard my rings pressed together.
“She gave you the whole thing?” I said.
“The whole thing.”
I turned to Deepak.
“Put it back with her ticket.”
Monique looked at me.
“You can’t make that decision.”
“I can stop asking her to give it up.”
Dad set the picture beside the locket.
The handwriting faced us.
“That’s Estelle’s writing,” he said.
Thirty-seven twenties
Monique pulled the bank envelope toward her.
“So that’s it? We just believe her?”
Dad kept his hand beside the photograph.
“I believe your mother wrote that.”
“She wrote Renee’s name on a picture. She wrote our names on pictures. We didn’t get every frame in the house.”
No one answered.
Monique looked at me.
“And you’re happy with this.”
“No.”
“Then why are you acting like she gets everything?”
Renee’s hand slipped out of mine.
“I don’t want everything.”
“You want the one thing we both remember. You came twice. Twice. Fiona and I were there while she was sick. Dad was there every day.”
Dad lowered his head.
“You don’t get to walk in after forty years and take the part we have left.”
“I didn’t walk in after forty years,” Renee said. “I was invited.”
“By a woman who was on medication.”
Dad lifted his face.
“Careful, Monique.”
“She was.”
“She knew you. She knew me.”
“That doesn’t mean she understood what she was doing.”
“You trusted her when she told you where the spare car key was.”
Monique’s mouth closed.
I wanted to thank him for that.
I wanted to grab his sleeve the way she had.
But this was the first thing he’d said that hadn’t needed one of us holding him up, and I left him alone.
Deepak slid the photograph back into the locket.
“Shall I finish this?” he said to Renee.
She nodded.
Monique put her hand on the counter.
“Wait.”
Deepak waited.
My sister turned toward me again.
“You’ve cost Dad his wife’s necklace over sixty dollars.”
Dad put his palm on the twenties.
“No. That money was to bring it home if it belonged to us.”
“It did belong to us.”
“It belonged to your mother.”
“And we’re her daughters.”
Dad looked at Renee.
Renee looked away.
Monique’s face went red.
“Don’t do that. Don’t look at her like that. You don’t even know her.”
“Neither did you when you called her a thief.”
My sister pulled the envelope under her hand.
“I was trying to help you.”
“I know.”
“And you gave me that money.”
“To buy the locket. Give it back.”
“Dad.”
“All of it.”
He held out his hand.
I expected Monique to throw the envelope down.
She’d done that with car keys and birthday cards and once, memorably, a packet of cheese slices when I told her they weren’t hers.
Instead she began putting the twenties into it.
Dad stopped her.
“Count it.”
She stared at him.
“There are people here.”
“Yes.”
The older woman stood near the door with her ring box in her bag.
The man with the guitar case had moved beside the wall.
Neither offered the mercy of suddenly needing to look at something else.
Monique counted.
She reached seven hundred forty and pushed the stack toward Dad.
He counted it again.
Thirty-seven notes. Seven hundred forty dollars and no necklace for Monique to wear out of the shop.
Dad put the money into his pocket.
My sister’s hand stayed on the bank envelope, which lay flat now.
Renee opened hers.
Deepak held out his palm for the coins.
She put them there, then counted the bills.
She had exactly what he had told her to bring.
Two hundred fourteen dollars and sixty cents.
He counted it once and set the money aside.
Monique said, “So she gets it cheaper.”
I looked at her.
“She gets her own loan paid off.”
“And you paid sixty dollars for the privilege.”
“Yes.”
“Money you couldn’t find when I needed help with the stone.”
There it was again.
The stone could’ve stood up and introduced itself by then.
I said, “We can talk about that another day.”
“We’ll never talk about it. You’ll be too busy playing sisters.”
Dad took a step toward her.
“Enough.”
“No. She sent me the picture. She got me excited. She let me believe we’d get something of Mom’s back. And now I’m the bad one.”
I could have filled the shop with all the ways she’d hurt me since February.
I had them ready. I hated that I had them ready.
Instead I took out my phone and turned the screen toward Deepak.
“I sent that before I opened it. I thought it had been stolen. I was wrong.”
Renee looked at me.
“And I shouldn’t have asked to buy it from under you,” I said.
Her face crumpled again.
Monique pushed away from the counter.
“So now you’re apologizing for me.”
“No.”
Dad faced Renee.
“I’m sorry I asked you to hand it over.”
Monique looked from him to me.
“Oh, this is lovely. This is a lovely little performance.”
Renee put both hands flat on the glass.
“I would like to take my locket.”
Deepak closed it and set it on her pawn ticket.
Monique reached toward it.
I put my hand in the way.
She stopped.
“You’ve made your point,” she said.
I kept my hand there until Renee picked it up.
The dent
Renee held the locket in her palm without trying to put it on.
Her thumb found the dent.
“She told me about this.”
Monique stood beside the door. She didn’t turn around.
“She said her little girl dropped it,” Renee said.
“She wouldn’t have it fixed because she’d told her it wasn’t ruined.”
I looked at my sister.
Her hand came away from the door handle.
When she’d been six, she’d cried so hard over that locket that Mom had put it on and worn it over her blouse for the rest of the afternoon.
I remembered because Monique followed her from room to room to check it was still there.
Renee touched the back again.
“She said you’d been afraid she wouldn’t love it anymore.”
Monique looked down.
For a second I thought she’d come back to the counter.
She shifted her weight, then stayed where she was.
Dad stood beside Renee.
“I don’t know what to say to you.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“I’ve got plenty. None of it seems right.”
That got a small laugh out of her.
He pointed toward the locket.
“May I?”
She opened her hand.
He didn’t take it. He touched the edge with one finger.
“She wore that on our wedding day.”
“I know.”
“She told you?”
Renee nodded.
Dad rubbed his eyes.
“I wish she’d told me.”
“So do I.”
“Would you have wanted to meet us?”
Renee looked at Monique, then at me.
“Yes.”
Dad made a sound I had heard only once before, in the den after the hospice nurse left.
I put my hand on his back.
He caught my wrist and held it there.
“I’m sorry, Fi.”
I leaned against him.
He was still my father. I was still angry with him.
Both fitted into that little space behind the counter, though I would’ve liked a chair for the effort of it.
Renee looked away while we held each other.
Dad let go of my wrist and offered her his hand.
She took it.
Then he pulled her into a hug so awkward that her envelope fell between them.
I picked it up.
The ticket was inside. Nothing else.
She’d come with exactly enough, and I was suddenly furious all over again that we’d made her count it in front of us.
When Dad stepped back, Renee wiped her face with her sleeve.
“Sorry,” she said.
Dad shook his head.
“No.”
Deepak put my hold receipt on the counter.
“That’s yours.”
Sixty dollars. Gone from my account for good.
I’d have to take lunch from home for a while, which was hardly a sacrifice worthy of a plaque.
I worked in a building where somebody was always offering me half a banana.
Renee looked at the receipt.
“I’ll pay you back.”
“No.”
“I can.”
“I know you can. You don’t have to.”
She looked at me for another second, then nodded.
I folded the receipt and put it away.
Renee lifted the chain.
“Could you do this?”
She turned her back to me.
I took the clasp between my fingers.
The front door
The clasp was worse than I remembered.
Mom used to accuse me of trying to undo it whenever I tried to fasten it.
Renee stood patiently while I fought the same tiny piece of metal.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s designed for somebody with smaller hands and no responsibilities.”
She laughed.
The sound caught me.
Mom had laughed through her nose when she was trying not to, and Renee did it too.
I caught the clasp on the next try.
“There.”
She turned around. The locket rested against her sweater.
I wanted to touch it again, so I asked.
“Can I?”
She lifted it toward me.
I rubbed my thumb over the dent.
I’d found Mom through that mark in a shop window.
Now I could let go of it without wondering whether somebody would melt it down.
Dad stood beside us with the bank envelope folded in his hand.
“I have pictures,” he said to Renee.
“Of your mother. Before she got sick.”
“I’d like to see them.”
“You should.”
Monique opened the door, then let it close.
“We’re going, Dad.”
He looked at her.
“I’m not ready.”
She stood there with nothing to do. No money to count.
No necklace to claim.
Deepak had put the pawn ticket into Renee’s envelope and handed it back to her.
The older woman passed us on her way out.
“That clasp gives everybody trouble,” she said.
It was such an ordinary thing to say that I nearly started crying again.
Renee touched my sleeve.
“Are you all right?”
“No. But I’m better than I was.”
“Me too.”
I wanted to ask her everything. Where she’d grown up.
Whether she liked her name.
Whether Mom had held her when she was born.
Questions crowded my mouth, and for once I didn’t make a job out of getting them all answered.
“I’d like your number,” I said.
She held out her hand for my phone.
I gave it to her.
She typed carefully, then passed it back. Renee. I added nothing after it.
No explanation in brackets. I knew who she was.
Dad touched my shoulder.
“I’ll call you later.”
“All right.”
“And Fiona?”
I looked up.
“You were right to buy her time.”
Monique turned from the door.
“Oh, please. She gets thanked now?”
Dad put his hand in his pocket.
“Yes.”
My sister looked at the locket on Renee’s neck.
Then she looked at me.
“You know she’s never giving that back.”
Renee’s fingers closed around it.
I picked up my purse.
Monique stayed in front of the door.
“After everything I’ve done, you’re really going to walk out with her?”
“Move, Monique.”
She stepped aside, and I walked out with my sister.
If this one got to you, send it to someone who knows how much can fit inside a mother’s locket.
Family keepsakes and funeral-day betrayals have a way of carrying more than their owners expect – see the coat that went missing before a funeral and the colonel who pushed a chair away from the radio. For another unsettling moment involving family, a flight attendant’s pen, and a son, read Angela’s story.
